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Paris

New York is the perfect city to live in if you are going to travel the world, it is incomparable to any place else that I have been. I feel proud and happy when it is my destination after a trip somewhere. My love for New York was completely full and undivided…

…until I went to Paris.

I wanted to go to Paris since I was a little girl, doesn’t everyone? I wanted to go, was always planning for the potential trip and finally I went last year after Eroticon 2013. London was another desired destination, but there was no way I was going to be that close to Paris and not go! After the conference, I hurried to bed for an early train to take me to Paris. In my taxi from Gare Nord, with my charming driver who knew very little English, my eyes were so wide. I kept expecting to hear accordions in the background (when I did on a train I would have tipped the accordionist if I had change).

I was afraid to go to Paris in a way, because I was so in love with it already I was afraid the reality could not live up to that sentiment. The first thing I discovered was that it is a real city, not a museum. People live there, and I tried to be very respectful of that even though I was gawking at everything I saw. Paris is smaller than New York City. As weird as it sounds as a native New Yorker, I hate crowds. I cannot imagine living in a very small town, but sometimes New York is overwhelming. Paris meanwhile is not empty, but you can walk down a street by yourself and hear yourself as well.

On every corner there was a cafe, restaurant, chocolate store or art museum. The things I live for…Sadly there are a lot of bookstores too, but my French is very light. I know how to say perfunctory things, but cannot elaborate the way I do well…here!

I stayed at the same hotel for two separate trips to Paris, and I am planning to stay there for the third trip as well. I love the arrondissement where I have stayed, which is bad-mouthed in all of the guidebooks and good! I want it to stay that way. I have barely eaten outside of the neighborhood, and the last time made friends with the bartenders who served me free snacks. There is a cheese store across the street from the hotel, and I still dream of the cheese I bought there…

Paris is for me a lovely place to exist and be hidden at the same time. As a visitor who is not fluent in the language, I am not an active part of the scene so I can be a voyeur. I enjoy it intensely because Paris is beautiful. On my second trip, I started to see how I could walk from place to place instead of taking the Metro. I started to feel like I was getting the hang of things.

Of course, the erotica editor and writer in me had to go to the Musee de l’Erotisme. I went to Pigalle on a rainy Saturday, down the block from the museum is the Moulin Rouge–with Starbucks across the street! You are not allowed to take pictures there, but my best memory was on the third floor I think, with a wall that told the history of prostitution in Paris. I walked that whole floor so intrigued, reading everything that was written.

Someone asked me why was I going to Paris again, and I answered because it is Paris! I was incredulous that a person could ask such a thing. The only thing about Paris that is a challenge for me is the language barrier, but someday it will not be a barrier either. I am a communicator, I cannot let it be a barrier…

Last Day

I have given up coffee for a while for Lent. I have no desire to discuss religion, I am not even that religious. But I do have a spiritual side, that makes me give up coffee. Coffee is given up because I know I can, and because it is something that I remember I have given up every day. Thus my relationship with coffee is more than just reaching for a cup first thing in the morning, it is more layered and involved.

My mother actually used to give me coffee in the morning when I was a little girl. Mine had milk, and hers was black. I cannot drink black coffee even to this day it makes me jumpy. When I was a teenager, I drank it because the boy I had a crush on at the time did, coffee with milk–a lot of it–and sugar–a lot of it too. I stopped after I didn’t like the boy anymore. I picked it up again when I was in college, because boys always bought coffee for me when we would sit in the cafeteria to be philosophical like you think you are when you are in college.

I never made a decision to have a cup of coffee because I wanted it on my own, just had a desire for it until I was out of college. It was then I would end up in a cafe to have coffee. I liked it at that point large, with half and half and a ton of sugar. Once in a Starbucks, someone said I liked a little coffee with my cream and sugar. There is a dear cafe in Brooklyn called The Tea Lounge, that made Turkish lattes…I bow to that greatness. I drank coffee at this point more as not a social thing, but something I did while writing. Coffee meant my solitude.

The decision to give it up was made because I just felt like it seemed like something to give up, to build character. To say I can do this. I cannot remember really giving anything up when I was in Catholic school, but this decision was made as an adult and I have stuck to it. One torturous year, I was drinking coffee with multiple shots of espresso, lost track of Lent and had a headache for the whole of it. To be clear, I do not give up caffeine, just coffee and coffee-flavored things. But not even cups and cups of black tea could soothe the headache I had for the entire of Lent.

This year was not so bad, I was very disciplined. I am not a cheater, if I say I am not going to do something I don’t. I will not waver in my decision, I am very faithful…There have been some points where I just drank water because any thought of another tea or chai made me almost nauseous.

My chosen cup tomorrow, I have not decided yet. There will likely be two. Half and half has been replaced with soy milk–which I learned how to say in French during my last trip to Paris–and I might add a flavored syrup but no sugar. I like simple cafe au laits for the most point, no weird concoctions. Half the time I even choose decaf. I like the flavor of coffee, the mug or take-away cup held between my hands warm, the warm fluid savored on my tongue for its every nuance and its warming me inside as it goes down. In the summer, I can be prone to milky iced coffee if it is really hot, then I like its cool sensation best on my tongue.

Knowing I give up coffee for 46 days every year (it looks so little when I type it, but feels so big when I do it), makes every bit I have over the rest of the year feel precious and almost exotic. I will hopefully be sipping a cup tomorrow, and not even feel like I missed a day…

photo by f dot leonora

I'm Going Hopping

My friends Lise Horton and Del Carmen were doing this blog hop, and I decided to hop along! It never hurts for me to remember why I do this:

1) What am I working on?

I am working on a variety of things including editing several projects for Ravenous Romance, posting to this blog and trying to write some short stories. I have been very inspired to write since attending Eroticon 2014, editing is a lovely thing and I love it but creating is something I love as well.

2) How does my work differ from others in its genre?

One thing I learned when I was taking writing courses was that no one is going to break the mold. All the stories have been told, the only difference is that I am telling it. I like erotic romance, I like stories where people love like their life depends on it. Love that is inconvenient and dominates the people who fall in it. I like the dark side of things not always BDSM, but the darkness that is revealed when people love that hard. When they are exposed and vulnerable…I love exploring the madness on the other side of that.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I wanted to be an actress at one point, a psychologist at another. I had more of a inclination to be creative, but acting was too much exposure for me. Writing allows me to take the risks I might have taken with acting, but instead I research it and probably go deeper with words on a screen. I was always told I was a good storyteller, and it seems like I let people talk me into believing it. I have always been driven to tell the stories people do not see or they may not want to see.

4) How does my writing process work?

This morning I got inspired by a name of a restaurant. It reminded me of an old actress, and I wanted to name my character that. Since I write nothing but love stories, it was how is she going to fall in love? Then I remembered I was already working on a story, and I know that character is going to fall apart in love. I do not really need to do anything but write the story. Sometimes I create a character who does something I am not familiar with, and I have to research to make it real. The same way that I will explore something that a character in a novel does like the time I was in a Tibetan restaurant and had tea with butter and sugar like I read about in Nicholas Christopher’s Veronica, that is the same way I will explore something just to get an idea of what it is like so I can make it ring true. I learned early on to write about what I know, some of my stories are very far from what I know, but I have stepped into the shoes of my character’s in some way so that I can tell it. Writers are really only mediums as I see it.

photo courtesy of www.feltmusic.it

Skimming

Jade A. Waters had the best blog post this week, recounting firsts. Aside from being dazzled by her eloquent writing, I became nostalgic about my own first reading of the erotica genre.

Until I was in my late teens, I was always sneak reading books I was not allowed to read in the open. Beside my mother’s bed was a treasure chest of romance novels (like mother, like daughter). There was a well-worn copy of Jackie Collins’ Chances that if my mom left me alone in her room, I tucked into while listening for her footsteps so I would not be caught with it.

I never was caught with a book that I was not supposed to be reading.

I skimmed so extensively piecemeal, that I practically had read the entire book by the time I was allowed to read it in the open, Shanna by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. It was actually funny when I read the entire book, I was finally able to put all the love scenes into some context. And even discovered some additional love scenes that I was not sophisticated enough to decipher because I was looking for the obvious ones.

Now the thing that intrigues me about how guarded we are about children these days, and what they see on television and read, is what happened to me from my experience of skimming books with material that I was not supposed to. It is how I became an erotic romance writer and editor. I was not taught that sex was dirty, my mother was always forthcoming with sexual information from the time I was six. My Barbie and Ken slept naked side by side like I saw on television, and my mom did not say a word to me about it or make me separate them.

When I skimmed Chances, I formulated a plot in my preteen head for a Montague/Capuletesque family saga with one family on the wrong side of the law, and the other family on the right side. I have to say writing the bad family was much more fun than writing the good family. In an issue of Cosmopolitan, Jackie Collins said she never used an outline for her stories. This is how I structure my stories as well, and since I am not capable of ending a love story badly, I usually know how it is going to end!

Shanna I think, and honestly any Kathleen E. Woodiwiss novel is the gold standard for romance. After skimming it, reading it in full and still skimming to this day for the good parts (which are not all sex scenes), I become lachrymose when I read Shanna. It is one of the best love stories I have ever read. My mother and I quoted from that novel, it left that kind of impact on us. The only time I have ever missed my stop on a train, was reading Forever in Your Embrace written years later by Woodiwiss. Kathleen Woodiwiss taught me how deep a love story has to be. If you are going to write a romance and not just an erotic piece, that love has to be everything. Something to die for, something to strive for…

None of this was a stretch for me, because I have always been violently, hopelessly romantic. I always look for love, I probably skim life looking for love…

photo courtesy of Amazon.com

What Makes You Stop?

There is a house on the top floor across the street from me that lights up completely red. Every time I see it, I stop to wonder what is going on inside that all red room? For the past few days the light has not been on, and I wonder why? What has stopped happening in that red room?

It could be a story, it should be a story, but by the time my key gets in the door and I start thinking about whatever it is that I need to do–or the nothing I plan to do after a day of work–that story never gets written by me.

I always have the urge to write. Even when there is nothing to write about. It is soothing to me to think about something that I might write, or something that I will write. I was stalling on a post for this week, and then this idea came to me because it was exactly what I was doing.

Stopping.

Is it writer’s block or fear that prevents you from getting the words on a page? I wrote this post when I was planning on writing whatever it was I wanted to on March 1, but yet I have not written very much at all. It is fiction that I am lamenting now, because I have been keeping up with this blog and morning pages. I want to create a world though, a sultry one. I crave this story even though I have not written it yet, or completely imagined it yet, but I know it. I know every contour of it, its breath, its passion…I especially know its breathless passion.

What makes me stop is time, and the perfectionist that lives in every writer. I have gotten better about the perfectionist in me, constantly reminding myself words are not indelible. Ideas honestly need to be jarred like fireflies, because if you forget them no matter how bright they are their light will permanently dim.

I hate to make excuses, but stopping is natural to the course of a writer…fortunately so is starting again…

photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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